Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food..

what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, ….

Status Anxiety: A worry, so pernicious as to be capable of ruining extended stretches of our lives, that we are in danger of failing to conform to th….

Being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say...but writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a da….

Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite..

Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don't know certain things. Yet often, they know but just don't care. So the task o….

Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole..

We tend to believe in the modern secular world that if you tell someone something once, they'll remember it. ... Religions go, "Nonsense. You need to….

Curiosity takes ignorance seriously - and is confident enough to admit when it's in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do ….

The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly..

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?.

Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions ….

If optimism is important, it's because many outcomes are determined by how much of it we bring to the task. It is an important ingredient of success.….

Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workma….

Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And ….

Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as ….

A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide..

[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way,….

He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that….

Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympat….

Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothin….